Award Data

Today’s prevailing methods of visual track inspection tend to be expensive, disruptive to operations, and have potential to be less thorough than preferred. To help address these issues, machine vision technology emerged in the rail sector over a decade ago; however, the technology has not achieved its expected potential due to the uncontrolled nature of rail environments. Recent findings have s ...

The goal of this proposal is to create the software Weave™ to automate the extraction of critical dimensions (CDs) from scanning electron microscope (SEM) images for the microelectronics industry. Current best practices for extraction of CDs are that personnel analyze the images one by one, which is tedious, prone to human bias, time-consuming and expensive. Successful implementation of Weave™ ...

Today’s Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications utilize restrictive mathematical assumptions to approximate the compound geometric intersections necessary to represent real-world products. As a result, critical information is not represented within the Model-Based Definition (MBD) for downstream users in the digital thread, forcing engineers to manually repair CAD models and convert them into d ...

The means to communicate real-time safety information to vehicles on a roadway are currently under development. Early indications show this advanced warning system along roadways would significantly enhance driver safety. However, incorporating such a system on rural highways is a particularly challenging element for the universal deployment of the system due to the vast mileage without the necess ...

The objective of this SBIR program is to demonstrate the use of patterned radar‐reflective roadway paint and marking tape to communicate safety messages from roadway infrastructure to vehicles and drivers. NanoSonic will work with transportation engineers in the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) and radar design and system engineers in the Virginia Tech Hume Center. Radar‐reflectiv ...

Additional passenger fatalities/injuries can occur during derailments involving interaction with wayside structures. Analogously, automobile fatalities often result from interaction of vehicles with roadside structures; personnel hazard reduction is a key design criterion for roadside structures. A similar approach for railroad wayside structures can be followed by incorporating damage mitigating ...

Secure trusted biometric validation of identity has never been more important. The increase in global terrorism, unfettered identity theft and new legislation requiring multi-factor authentication are a few of the driving factors. The biometrics industry has not actively responded to the changing market conditions being driven by the explosion in mobile computing. Millions of new mobile devices ar ...

There is no capability to rapidly assess the electrical properties of nanofiber films during manufacturing and prepregging process. Continuous monitoring of these films will guide the U.S. nanofiber manufacturing industry in optimizing and increasing the yield rate with proper process optimization and avoid any inconsistency in the process and the cost with associated waste material. To address th ...

The objective of this DoT SBIR program is to further establish the technical foundation of low friction HybridSil® Slippery Overturn Automobile Protection (SOAP) coatings on concrete barriers for drastic reductions in vehicle rollover potential and significantly increased concrete impact durability thus, enabling the rapid commercial integration of these coatings. To meet this challenge, NanoSoni ...

Our goal is to create a demonstrable software system that we call IntelliFusion, which fuses Connected Vehicle data with data from traditional inductive loop detectors and uses this data to improve traffic control at intersections across the country. Our work will improve the safety of intersections and improve the mobility of traffic through adaptive traffic control which uses data produced by I ...